Further ramblings of a self-made pauper

The question of the day for me is, “Has Paul McCartney finally gone off his rocker?” What with Ringo (Peace and Love, Peace and Love) deciding not to sign any more autographs and being particularly odd in his method of communicating this, it seems that age is beginning to tale its toll of the surviving members of the Fab Four.

It seems that a track they laid down in 1967 for an electronic music festival and which had been thought to be mythical, really does exist. Macca wanted to put it on one of the Beatles’ anthology series, but the others vetoed him.

The track is apparently called Carnival of Light and never released because the other Beatles thought it too adventurous. This description of the recording method suggests they were right:

Sir Paul explained: "I said all I want you to do is just wander around all the stuff, bang it, shout, play it, it doesn't need to make any sense. Hit a drum then wander on to the piano, hit a few notes, just wander around.
"So that's what we did and then put a bit of an echo on it. It's very free."
The track was played just once, at the festival, and is said to include distorted guitar, organ sounds, gargling and band members shouting phrases such as "Barcelona!" and "Are you all right?"

Bearing in mind that the Beatles issued Lennon’s Revolution 9, one of the biggest pieces of bollocks ever committed to tape on the White Album, and that Lennon went on to even stranger stuff with Yoko, which is considered bizarre even today, 40 years on, it suggests that Carnival of Light should stay in Macca’s personal collection only.

“Too adventurous” in context sounds rather like Sir Humphrey suggesting to Jim Hacker that it is a “brave decision” ie probably best not done.

Still, what do I know?

Those of you who know me will recognise (I hope) that I have a buoyant personality. I’ll leave it to you to decide whether or not it is an engaging one, but I think even someone who doesn’t much care for my presence would admit that I am a “glass half full” sort of bloke.

That said, twenty-four years (which is what it will be at the end of this month) of putting up with the endless and tiresome drivel this place and its antecedents routinely pours over a body for no regard or reward is taking its toll. It is getting harder to get up and wind my way in here in a morning; I find that I no longer really care and that even those areas of work that I would previously have found interesting no longer really engage my interest.

And it’s cumulative, this sapping of the will and morale. The place drains you just a little faster than you can replenish it, so every day the reserve of patience is a little lower and a little quicker to exhaust. I may have mistimed my holiday plans by about a week. I am taking the week leading up to Easter off. I almost think that I should have taken the week before that off, or even this week. The batteries need a recharge and the cylinders, a re-bore. In the longer term I think I need a more complete change: just holding down a job isn’t really enough at the moment.

I thought that I’d had my mid life crisis about ten years ago; for about fifteen minutes after a particularly brutal drinking session down the Bedford Arms in Clapham. Damn it, I think I’m having another one now.

Give me twenty minutes to get my head back together.